The dramaturg’s note by Robert Shimko, a UH assistant professor, got off on the wrong foot with me by comparing the play to “a room full of Rauschenberg’s combines come to life (rather) than a traditional, linear play about his life.” A room full of Rauschenberg’s combines is already alive, I thought. Worry about making your production come to life instead.

When he started working on the piece, (playwright Charles) Mee first created a list of “stuff in Rauschenberg’s works” that included: stuffed chickens, roller skates, cardboard boxes, JFK, MLK, and an astronaut. He then generated a list of “stuff it makes me think of” like: a chicken farmer talking, an astronaut talking to Houston base, a car-tow service operator talking, and pillow talk. Comparing Mee’s two lists shows an intuitive process of conversion from the concrete objects of Rauschenberg’s visual artworks to the theatrical building blocks of human action and speech. From this process, the characters and events that make up bobrauschenbergamerica began to develop.

When I say that I can’t see Rauschenberg’s combines in this production, I mean that literally: you can’t make anything out in the slideshow of combines that plays when the character of Bob’s Mom waxes nostalgic. The images of combines are meant to stand in for snapshots of Rauschenberg as a child, which is a nice art/life conflation, but you really can’t see them. You just know that they’re there, which is kind of a metaphor for how one perceives the influence of the combines on the play itself.

Although director J.Ed Arazia was an original cast member, Shimko notes that there’s probably less Rauschenberg in this bobrauschenbergamerica than was originally the case:

In the original production, the SITI Company approached the play with the conceit that Bob Rauschenberg was the dramaturg, meaning that his sensibility, especially the unexpected tensions created between the various elements in his combines, was used as a guide to working with the text. In our production, Rauschenberg may still be something like a spiritual dramaturg, but he is one among many.

Nothing wrong with that. I decided fairly early on to forget about Rauschenberg and just enjoy the departure, which is for the most part a lively and entertaining one. Robin Grace Thompson’s choreography plays a big role in keeping the play, which is really a series of vignettes, going. The cast seems to be having a great time, and that’s contagious.

“I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun,” Rauschenberg, who died in May, once said. This production has that kind of vibe.